R.T. Jamison | Excerpt | Forty Days in the Desert

I t’s raining sand. Fine, warm, flaxen sand. It drifts down like powdered sugar and dusts the trees and lawn furniture. No breeze distracts this sand from its sharp incline, straight down. It trails away skyward, a faint yellow smudge in a cloudless expanse. Such an apparition hardly gathers any attention for hours. No one seems to notice the slow buildup of grit, a grainy patina on what many neighbors already consider an eyesore. The mounds of tires, the tattered lawn furniture, the junked cars, the mailbox crafted from an engine block. Somehow a dusting of sand makes this ramshackle ranch house on an unpaved road in an unincorporated expanse seem staged and muted—as if our lens is smudged with a bit of white lithium grease. The sand goes unnoticed. It is, admittedly, a dusty place.

The full story appeared in the

Kenyon Review
Vol. 36 No. 3 (Summer 2014)
ISSN:0163-075x

^{The Kenyon Review, founded in 1939,

is published by Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.}